Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP): symbolic icon for the nuclear power option in the Philippines

Note: This photo-essay appeared in the 13-19 March 2015 edition of FilAm Star, 'the newspaper for Filipinos in mainstream America' published in San Francisco, CA. The author/blogger is the Manila-based Special News/Photo Correspondent of the said weekly.

The mothballed Bataan nuclear power plant.

After 26 years, I walked down the Bataan nuclear facility
last week. A walk down was a regular routine as a health physicist there until
1988 when I decided to join the risk management department at the National
Power Corporation home office in Quezon City.

A fellow ex-nuke worker from Canada was here for a visit,
and we both took the chance to renew acquaintance with the BNPP, and nothing
could beat walking down the well-preserved spick-and-span reactor, steam
generator, and auxiliary buildings.We
tarried for sometime inside the main control room, which has remained as it was
many years ago. Deja vu! We felt the excitement of visitors when they cross the
double hatchway to get a view of the reactor, among other things, at the
reactor pool. This is an experience they would not get in an operating nuclear
facility.

Throwback:it was
Philippine Nuclear Power Plant (PNPP) until August 1992 when President Fidel V.
Ramos issued Executive Order No. 13 renaming it the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant
(BNPP).

We recalled getting systems and procedures ready to
implement the radiation exposure management program once the fuel assemblies got
loaded to the core. Actually, that program went in place as soon as the nuclear
fuel arrived in 1984 at the international airport, transported by land, and
deposited at the plant in Napot Point, Morong town in Bataan province.

Scale model of BNPP.

Radiation monitoring continued even if the plant did not
operate until the unused nuclear fuel was sold to Siemens and shipped out on 15
December 1997. After that date, the facility was nuclear in name only; it became
a non-nuclear facility.

BNPP, located at the tip of a 389-hectare government
reservation at Napot Point, was a 620MW Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) nuclear
power plant built by Westinghouse.It was
designed to withstand a postulated earthquake of intensity 8 in the Richter
Scale (or ground acceleration value of 0.4G).Since it is 18 meters above sea level ground elevation, the site is well-protected
against tidal waves and tsunamis.

Construction started in March 1976. It was almost
complete in 1984 and all the equipment and systems had passed the hot
functional tests.Core loading was
eagerly anticipated. But EDSA 1 changed all that. In November 1986, the Cory
administration decided to mothball the plant and designated NPC as caretaker.

Through the
years, there had been discourses on the “the conversion of BNPP into
alternative utilization” both for energy and non-energy purposes.

In May 1993, for example, President Ramos
directed the secretary of energy “to consider only non-nuclear options for the
operation of the BNPP” considering the results of a study on the “repair,
upgrade and operation of BNPP as a nuclear power plant as proposed by
Westinghouse.”He reiterated this
position in 1997 when other conversion proposals were studied.

In 2008, upon the
request of the Philippine government, the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) deployed a team of experts “to counsel ... on the practicalities
of revitalizing the plant.” Akira Omoto, Director of the IAEA´s Division of
Nuclear Power and leader of that mission, explained that the Philippine “has to
assess what the new licensing requirements should be, how to modernize the
two-decades old technology to current standards, and how to confirm that all
aspects of the plant will function properly and safely. It is not the IAEA´s
role to state whether the plant is usable or not, or how much it will cost to
rehabilitate."

The hatchway door to the nuclear reactor (left); a view of moderating rods at the nuclear pool (right).

The other issue is if there is a discussion on the
nuclear option in the power development program in the country.Apparently, there is. Mauro L. Marcelo, Jr., NPC’s asset
preservation manager, informed that a multi-agency nuclear energy group headed
by the secretary of energy has been created to study the nuclear option but so
far this has not issued any official pronouncements. Marcelo, who was also with BNPP before,
thinks that nuclear power may come around 2030 just like in our ASEAN
neighbors: Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.

In 2008, BNPP was
opened to the public as part of the government’s information, education and
communication program on nuclear power.It is almost a tourist site except that the visitors are largely
students who come by the busloads for an educational tour of the facility.

Marcelo said that
former Congressman Mark Cojuangco, a strong advocate of nuclear power, brings students
and other groups to the site and he himself conducts the thorough briefings on the
BNPP story vis-a-vis the nuclear option.

The preserved control room (left); the turbine, which is turned regularly (right).

This reminds that
the Nuclear Power Steering Committee (NPSC), in its final report to President Fidel
Ramos in 1998, emphasized the prominence of public education and information in
building the climate of public acceptance of the nuclear option. The committee,
composed of Cabinet secretaries and the head of the Philippine Nuclear Research
Institute (PNRI), was created to “provide policies, direction, monitoring,
evaluation, and other functions necessary ...to attain “the objectives of the overall Nuclear Power Program of the
country.”

Aside from public
information and information, recommendations of the NPSC came from various
studies like nuclear manpower development and siting, among others.These remain relevant until today. New
studies will takeoff from these.

Regarding nuclear
manpower, the NPSC reported, “Assuming that the first nuclear plant will
come on line in 2021 with a lead time of 15 years for the planning,
pre-construction and construction phases (meaning, the project will start in
2006), there is a need for slow but calculated build-up of the manpower base
using young engineers and technologists.” This means that a timetable for manpower
training has to be mapped in any proposed nuclear power program.

From the siting study, ten candidate sites of a new
nuclear power plant were submitted to President Ramosin January 1996: five in Luzon, three in the
Visayas and two in Mindanao. There was a preliminary assessment of candidate
sites in Cagayan, Negros and Palawan. The presentation did not immediately evoke the
expected outroar. The delayed reaction came later through resolutions espousing
nuclear-free sentiments from concerned groups in Central Visayas, Negros
Oriental and Palawan.

Siting parameters considered were safety and non-safety
aspects.Geology, population, meteorogical, climatological and environmental
aspects were safety considerations. Some non-safety aspects studied were socio-cultural,
military and security, economics of transmission, site development and
transportation access, and political factors. Others that were studied included
average population density, water supply, land use, siltation/erosion, and security
against volcanic events.

The cove west of BNPP has been converted into a resort facility aptly called West Nuk Beach.

For sure, the future Philippine Nuclear Power Plant will be
giant issue to hurdle considering the long campaign for public acceptance
especially by the population in the host town or province.Eventually, the siting consideration boils
down to nuclear security, safety and
safeguards.